With the rapidly expanding use of online services, the pervasiveness of network connectivity, and the increasing speed of networks, it is becoming more and more common for computing devices to rely on networked resources for their operation. For example, resources may provide updates automatically. The networked resources may notify the connected devices when updates are available, and of various operational information.
A resource may provide notifications by connecting to a device via the network. For example, devices may poll the resource periodically to check to see if a notification is available. This sort of polling may generate a large amount of network traffic at the resource, most of which is wasted since notifications are rare relative to the amount of polling.